kip/bot/blog

For some sad reason, I was thinking about software design and development this morning.  Then I stumbled into doing some GoodReads reviews, ranking, and shelving. During this session, I noted that The Mythical Man Month is pretty much spent (we’ve absorbed it all several times over, and those who haven’t won’t be able to get past the IBM acronyms to make sense of the book). I also expressed my worries that a book about prototyping is going to be wonk-city, focusing on flows and block diagrams with sharp, deadening analytic edges.  Then I wrote up a bit about Paul Graham’s Hackers and Painters, whose title I loved and which is a pretty good read on a wide range of subjects (craftsmanship, HR, inspiration and innovation). Then I got this screen:

How cool is that. My non-fiction interests in a more creative side of software, points me to John Irving, McCarthy, an interesting choice of Camus. Compare to Amazon:

Yes, the titles are all relevant, but the GoodReads recos are serendipitous, surprising, tasty. I also like the name of GoodReads reco engine: richRelevance. Something worth shooting for.

The widely blogged NYT article about the new interfaces has a nice passage about the new breed of designer emerging, one who codes.  The article describes how the Wii and iPhone are beacons of a move from the mouse-gui mode of interface that has dominated the last 20+ years of computing. (It does the obligatory Minority Report mention, of course.)

The transition to more immersive displays is happening in part because of more powerful computer hardware, but also because of an explosion of more powerful programming tools. These tools offer visual effects that were once within the grasp of only the most skillful programmers to a wide audience with only basic skills.

“The old paradigm is breaking down,� said Paul Mercer, senior director of software at Palm Inc. “It used to be that you needed to be a visionary and technologist like Michelangelo, but we’re turning that corner.�

INDEED, the more powerful graphics-oriented software has spilled over into the creation of palettes for a new generation of software-oriented artists. One new programming language, Processing, is an extension of Sun’s Java designed specifically for students, artists, designers, researchers and hobbyists who are interested in programming images, animations and interactions. It has been used extensively at “Design and the Elastic Mind,� a digital art exhibition now at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

I’m not sure that they’ve captured the dynamic exactly.  Programming tools are becoming more powerful, to be sure, but designers (especially the under-25 set cited in the NYT article) are becoming more technical.  Processing, or Proce55ing, is not Logo or pure kids stuff.

Fun little article in the Sunday NYT about the influence of Gary Gygax on generations exposed to D&D. Sunday is when things get summed up from a longer perspective than the news itself, so it makes bigger claims than the obituary.

For us, the character sheet and the rules for adventuring in an imaginary world became a manual for how people are put together. Life could be lived as a kind of vast, always-on role-playing campaign.

Don’t give me that look. I know I’m not a paladin, and I know I don’t live in the Matrix. But the realization that everyone else was engaged in role-playing all the time gave my universe rules and order.

We geeks might not be able to intuit the subtext of a facial expression or a casual phrase, but give us a behavioral algorithm and human interactions become a data stream. We can process what’s going on in the heads of the people around us. Through careful observation of body language and awkward silences, we can even learn to detect when we are bringing the party down with our analysis of how loop quantum gravity helps explain the time travel in that new “Terminator� TV show. I mean, so I hear.

The writer, an editor from Wired, goes a little farther than I would, or did. I’m not so sure that D&D kinked us to understand people better, but it fer sher made us more proficient at reducing them and their actions to flow charts and equations.

The article’s worth a read if only to check out the info-graphic, a boxes and arrows play on D&D-driven geekness. It may span too many generations, though. The clip I grabbed shows the TRS-80 and cassettes and Captain Crunch, but also covers Vin Diesel, Peter Jackson and LOLCats. Still, fun exercise to look at the black boxes . . .

Not sure I completely understand this, but Rock, Paper, Shotgun is reporting an MMORPG which is being created by one developer (Eskil Steenburg) who is using generative design techniques to create his world. The idea of a single programmer/artist creating anything game-like is exciting in the age of 30 person EA teams being needed for everything. But to have it be a generatively designed world, and one that looks like the screenshots here, is amazing. RPS is also gaga:

Since Steenberg is a one man show, he’s relying on clever maths to build the world for him and then clever gamers to come in and help him figure out where to take it, and what to do with it.So far he’s already populated it with weird animals and wondrous, gaseous visuals, and he intends to build the world into a kind of communal adventure, where gamers work together to furnish a central village, defend it from enemy attack, and explore the surround world and its many dungeons. Players will be able to do things like deform elements of terrain, allowing them to build tunnel networks or walls to defend their property. Items will also be intended for the good of all as Steenberg creates them and drops them into the world. You won’t be picking up rifles in your adventures, but more likely the plans for the rifle-building machine, that can then be utilised by everyone in your village. Part Zelda, part Tale In The Desert, part adventure shooter, and wholly abstract and beautiful, Love looks the kind of amalgam of art, programming and internet savvy that we’ve desired without even being able to imagine. It has the potential, and Steenberg has the huge intellect, for this to be one of the most precious events in PC gaming.

The glowing passage above arose from seeing Steenberg (the programmer) at GDC. (i’m not sure I’m all that excited about ‘gaseous visuals’, but the rest sounds nifty.) The site for the game is a cryptic mix of vision language for the game (love is . . .) and techno-speak describing the engine and tools for creating within it. Probably wisely, there is no place to sign up. Steenburg is saying he only needs a couple hundred players to validate and build the world.

Konigi has a post today about Blind Text Generator, shown below:

It’s got the traditional greek more accurately labelled with the Latin Cicero, it’s got some Kafka text (from Metamorphosis) and does a nice job chopping it up into paragraphs, and character counts.

The Konigi post has some comments about the laziness of using greek:

I prefer not to use dummy text, because creating wireframes and comps that reflect how they will really look and function is what people pay me for, and is a sign of a lazy IA/IXD. Plus it can be really enjoyable to write real fake copy.

Real fake copy, however enjoyable to write, can also be messy, so I don’t buy the notion that it’s laziness (especially when one is creating systems for content delivery — article templates and the like). But, if one wants something that feels more real, and is actually kind of eerie, I recommend Hexatron’s wisdom generator. (Scroll to the bottom of the page and look for “Endless Wisdom”.) It’s based on an algorithm from Kernighan & Pike that chops up a real piece of text and reparses it into something that feels like the real thing . . . until you try to parse it. Check out an old testament passage generated by the algorithm:

The Bush speak one is also fun.

Interesting Microsoft move pre-reported by TechCrunch this morning:  Bill Gates will announce (or has announced) that (verified) students will have access to MSFT development tools for free.  In a program called Dreamspark, students can get the entire Visual Studio line, Expression, Windows Server, and Game Studio.  It’s a smart way to compete with open source, build the community of developers who work with and prefer Windows, and build brand loyalty at a formative phase of someone’s career.

Channel 8 did an interview with Bill Gates about this initiative which turned into talking about software.  Despite outsourcing and the commoditization of certain development skills, Gates is still quite bullish on the importance of programming:

[People can use MSFT dev tools to] build a career around or build fun software for themselves.

The skill of design, skill of knowing what good code looks like … will be around for the next couple decades.
There’s nothing more fun than thinking about software . . . software for the poor (there’s a lot more work that needs to be done), software to make jobs more interesting, software to help peofle design things in new ways … if you think about the sciences today they’re really driven by software … biology has so much information that it’s really software people who are gong to help find patterns and organize that information.

Roberto and Lizette Greco are plush toy designers (among other things) who designed a plush mascot for a ‘one laptop per child’ campaign’ (Un Computador por Nino, or UNPC) in Chile. The mascot is pretty cute, and UNPC even has a youTube group.

UNPC does not officially support or promote the XO, they are simply lobbying for one laptop per child as an educational initiative. So Pudu, the mascot, is carrying a less distinctive laptop.

They have a flickrstream about their children’s experience with the XO (the first pic does an evaluation of all the software they’ve installed)

They also highlighted two other piece of educational software: Squeakland, which is the inspiration for eToys; and Scratch, a programming language which looks like an interactive game/environment language. Scratch looked pretty complicated to me, but the Grecos say their kids (aged 7 and used really took to it:

Published a few years ago, Leonardo’s Laptop was a disappointing book. The premise was exciting: how would we conceive computing and the internet if Leonardo were using a laptop, like he used his notebooks?

But the book largely broke down into a discussion of usability and how technology could transform medicine, the arts, engineering, politics. That said, there are some good, Powerpoint-worthy(!), lines from the author and the people he quotes.

I feel … an ardent desire to see knowledge so disseminated through the mass of mankind that it may … reach even the extremes of society: beggars and kings. — Thomas Jefferson

A fuchsia cell phone might be pretty. But a cell phone that does not require a manual — now that is beauty. – Katrina Galway, Letter to the Editor, Time Magazine

Creativity can solve almost any problem. The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything. — George Lois

JJ Abrams, in his TEDTalk, has some great lines about tools and inspiration.  He relates the importance of his Super 8 camera when he was 10, a synthesizer when we was 14 (he composed the theme to Alias), and he has a great line about his Powerbook:

mystery is the catalyst to imagination

technology is mind-blowingly inspiring to me, that blank page is a magic box

the Powerbook challenges me, it says ‘what are you gonna write worthy of me?’